Hardwick called back ten minutes later, faster than Gurney had expected. The surprising truth about Hardwick: Lurking at the center of that exasperating personality was a very sharp mind. How far might the man have gone, Gurney often wondered, and how much happier might he be were he not so encumbered by his own attitudes? Of course, that was a question that applied to a lot of people, himself not the least.
Gurney didn’t bother saying hello. “You agree with me, Jack?”
“It’s not a sure thing.”
“Nothing is. But you understand the logic, right?”
“Sure,” said Hardwick, managing to convey that he understood it without being impressed by it. “The time Tambury PD got the call from Ashton about the teacup was four-fifteen. And Ashton said he ran into the house as soon as he realized what had happened. Making some assumptions about the time it would take him to get from the patio table to the nearest phone inside the house, maybe looking out the window a few times to check for any sign of the shooter, dialing the actual local PD number rather than just 911, allowing for a couple of rings before it was answered-all that would put the actual gunshot back to about four-thirteen. But that’s just the gunshot. To connect it the way you’re connecting it to the exact time of the murder the week before, you gotta make three giant leaps. One, the teacup shooter is the same guy who killed the bride. Two, he knew the precise minute he killed her. Three, he wanted to send a message by blasting the teacup at the same minute of the same hour of the same day of the week. That’s what you’re saying?”
“Close enough.”
“It’s not impossible.” Hardwick’s voice conjured the habitually skeptical expression that had etched permanent lines into his face. “But so what? What the hell difference does it make whether it’s true or not?”
“I don’t know yet. But there’s something about the echo effect…”
“One severed head and one smashed teacup, each in the middle of a table, one week apart?”
“Something like that,” said Gurney, suddenly doubtful. Hardwick’s tone had a way of making other people’s ideas sound absurd. “But getting back to the mountain of crap you dumped in my lap, is there anyplace you’d like me to start?”
“Start anywhere, ace. You won’t be disappointed. Just about every sheet of paper there has at least one weird twist. Never seen a weirder, twistier case. Or a weirder, twistier bunch of people. The message from my gut? Whatever the fuck’s going on ain’t what it seems to be.”
“One more question, Jack. How come there’s no record of a follow-up interview with Withrow Perry regarding the teacup incident?”
After a moment’s silence, Hardwick emitted a raspy bray, hardly a laugh at all. “Sharp, Davey, very sharp. Zeroed in on that super quick. There wasn’t any official interview because I was officially removed from the case the same day we discovered that the good doctor happened to own the perfect gun for putting a bullet through a teacup at three hundred yards. I’d call the failure to follow up on that fact a fucking stupid oversight on the part of the new CIO, wouldn’t you?”
“I gather you didn’t go out of your way to remind him?”
“Not allowed anywhere near the active investigation. I was warned off by no less than our revered captain.”
“And you were taken off the case because…?”
“I already told you. I spoke inappropriately to my superior. I informed him of the limitations of his approach. I may also have alluded to the limitations of his intelligence and general unsuitability for command.”
A long ten seconds passed without either man speaking.
“You sound like you hate him, Jack.”
“Hate? Nah. I don’t hate him. I don’t hate anybody. I love the whole fucking world.”
Chapter 14
Having cleared just enough space for his laptop between a couple of document piles on the long table, Gurney went to the Google Earth website and entered Ashton’s Tambury address. He centered the image over the cottage and the thicket behind it, enlarging it to the maximum resolution available. With the help of the scale data attached to the image and the directional and distance information from the rear of the cottage shown in the case file, Gurney was able to narrow the location of the murder weapon’s discovery to a fairly small area in the thicket about a hundred feet from Badger Lane. So after leaving the cottage through the back window, Flores walked or ran out there, partially covered the blade of the still-bloody weapon with some dirt and leaves, and then… what? Managed to get to the road without leaving any further scent for the dogs to follow? Headed down the hill to Kiki Muller’s house? Or was she right there on the road in her car-waiting to help him escape, waiting to run off with him to a new life they’d been planning together?
Or did Flores simply walk back to the cottage? Is that why the scent trail went no farther than the machete? Is it conceivable that Flores concealed himself in or around the cottage itself-concealed himself so effectively that a swarm of troopers, detectives, and crime-scene techs failed to discover him? That seemed unlikely.
As Gurney looked up from his laptop screen, he was startled to see Madeleine sitting at the end of the table, watching him-so startled that he jumped in his seat.
“Jesus! How long have you been there?”
She shrugged, made no effort to answer.
“What time is it?” he asked, and immediately saw the inanity of the question. The clock over the sideboard was in his line of sight, not hers. The time, 10:55 P.M., was also displayed on the computer screen in front of him.
“What are you doing?” she asked. It sounded less a question than a challenge.
He hesitated. “Just trying to make sense out of this… material.”
“Hmm.” It was like one syllable of a humorless laugh.
He tried to return her steady gaze, found it difficult.
“What are you thinking?” he said.
She smiled and frowned, almost at the same time.
“I’m thinking life is short,” she said finally, in the way of someone who has come face-to-face with a sad truth.
“And therefore…?”
Just as he concluded she wasn’t going to answer him, she did. “Therefore we’re running out of time.” She cocked her head-or maybe it was a tiny, involuntary spasm-and regarded him curiously.
“Time for what?” he was tempted to ask, feeling an urge to turn this untethered exchange into a more manageable argument, but something in her eyes stopped him. Instead he asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shook her head. “Life is short. That’s all. It’s something to consider.”
Chapter 15
Several times during the hour following Madeleine’s visit to the kitchen, Gurney was on the verge of going into the bedroom to pursue the significance of her comment.
Madeleine did, from time to time, for brief periods, seem to view things through a bleak lens. It was as though the focus of her vision shifted to a barren spot in the landscape and saw in it a paradigm of the whole earth. But the shift had always been temporary; her focus widened again, her joy and pragmatism returned. It had happened that way before, so no doubt it would happen that way again. But for the moment her attitude disconcerted him, creating an anxious hollowness in his stomach-a feeling that he wanted to escape from. He went to the coatrack in the pantry, slipped on a light jacket, and stepped out through the side door into the starless night.
Somewhere above the thick overcast, a partial moon made the darkness less than total. As soon as he could discern the outline of the path through the overgrown weeds, he followed it down the gentle pasture slope to the weathered bench that faced the pond. He sat, watching and listening, and his eyes slowly distinguished a few dim shapes, edges of objects, perhaps parts of trees, but nothing clearly enough to be identified for sure. Then, across the pond, maybe twenty degrees off his line of sight, he sensed a slight movement. When he looked directly at the spot, the dark shapes, indistinct at best-large bramble bushes, drooping branches, cattails growing up in tangled clumps at the edge of the water, and whatever else might be there-blended formlessly together. But when he looked away, just off to the side of where he thought the movement had been, he saw it again-almost certainly an animal of some kind, perhaps the size of a small deer or a large dog. His eyes darted back, and once again it disappeared.